There are two months that make the American writer quiver with fear and anticipation, April and November. April is National Poetry Month, and most poets, and not a few people insisting that they are NOT poets, attempt to write a poem a day for all thirty days, scouring the internet for lists of prompts, fellow poets to workshop with, encouraging one another to write just. One. More!!!!!!!!!!

November, as National Novel Writing (Write, Writers?) Month, or NaNoWriMo to its friends, opens up the floodgates a tad further. In November, the sky is the limit. Not excluding the muse to poetry, many writers use November as the push to get that novel they’ve been dying to write started, or finished, or, (as in my case), started again somewhere in the middle of the beginning. Short stores, flash, and yes, even poetry, are typed, scrawled, scribbled, or elegantly handwritten in overwrought cursive loops. It doesn’t matter the hows or whys or what, just as long as something, ANYTHING! gets down on paper or drive, one day at a time.

I usually take November off. There’s enough to do with Thanksgiving, Christmas looming. But this year has been pretty productive, publishing wise, and I’ve got a lot of new ideas bottled up, just begging for release. NaWRiMo seems as good an excuse as any.

I’m also studying up for the GRE. If you’ve ever taken it, you know that vocabulary plays a huge part on the verbal section. And so, in the spirit of my Three Dollar Word series, I’m going to take a word a day from the “Hit Parade” lists found in the Princeton Review‘s Cracking the GRE book, and at least write one poem around it. If I’m feeling up to it, I might also incorporate it into a short story, or a work already in progress. At some point during the day, I will post the word I’m using for that day, to help along any other writer out there eager to get something written, but needing a place to start.

Today, the word is Misanthrope. I wrote a poem about a Mr. Misanthrope, and threw the adjective misanthropic into a fresh page of Cain. Go me!

A misanthrope is someone who hates other people. I am not a misanthrope, but I know misanthropes. Oi do I know misanthropes.